Henry David Thoreau

The buckeye does not elevate in New England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here. The state of nature goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his betting in Canada, feature a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the shadow in a southern bayou. Even the bison . . . keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the cobalt only until a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowst whizz (Thoreau 264).

The experiment at Walden was for Thoreau an attempt to watch within nature, to "transcend" not actually life but the prison of society and conformity which alienates bit from himself, from differents, from the spiritual reality which is the essence of nature. To Thoreau, macrocosm had become disapprove by the insignificantness and complexity of society. He stands with the Transcendentalists when he sees in nature the answer to many of the problems, especially the spiritual problems, of man:

If . . . we would restore mankind by truly, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, allow us first be as simple and head as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores (Thoreau 64).

Thoreau in Walden not only expresses his desire for and understanding of the spiritual component in human life and in nature, his concrete experiences also rate the lie to the argument that Transcendentalism, at least insofar as it was expressed and lived by Thoreau, was far from a pie-in-the-sky type of philosophy.

Bickman writes of the Transcendentalists

Bickman writes as well that Thoreau himself criticized Transcendentalists, or at least the meetings of the Transcendentalist Club, which he "found . . . too genteel and fantastic for his tastes." In fact,

the exact relation of Walden to transcendentalism has been debated. At one extreme, the book is seen as the artistic culmination of the movement, its one undisputable book-length masterpiece. At the other, it is seen as a significant break, even a refutation, especially of transcendentalism's metaphysical predilection for spirit over function and its minimizing of the senses (Bickman 11).

"Simplify, simplify," wrote Thoreau . . .

, having gone into the woods near Walden Pond to live in a small house of his own making, on whatsoever he could make or grow himself. The decision to live simply was born of Thoreau's dismay at the way consort had replaced living as the purpose of existence in nineteenth century New England.

Bickman, Martin. Walden: Volatile Truths. New York: Twayne, 1992.

that "they deserve to be called radical intellectuals, because like their contemporary, Karl Marx, they felt that the task of philosophy was not to explain the world but to change it" (Bickman 7). At Walden, Thoreau seek not only to change the world, but to create his own world, a world grounded in nature and reason, with a Transcendentalist purview and purpose.

Thoreau sought not only to transcend the oppressed, alienated, conforming lives of almost men, but also to point out the errors of the ways of others. For example, Wackerman writes:

The Transcendentalist arithmetic mean stresses a divorce from materialism, from consumerism, from the belief that life is inevitably meaningless labor and a series of complex and oppressive conflicts with other human beings and with institutions. As Austin-Smith writes:

. . . Thoreau noted the "unconscious despair" in human "games and amusements," which were not really playful because they were second in importance to work (Austin-Smith
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